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February 05, 2014

At the India Geospatial Forum in Hyderabad, Alan Abraham, an architect with Abraham John Architects in Bombay outlined a farsighted plan for dramatically changing the availability of and accessability to green space in Bombay. Alan used a combination of architectural design and geospatial tools to identify and qualify the challenge and design his proposal for an accessible unique green space in Bombay.

By way of background Bombay is a linear North-South city bounded on the East and West by water and divided down the middle by a 114 km North-South rail line, which carries 7.7 million passengers every day. Crossing this line is hazardous - there are about 4,000 fatalities every year related to the rail line, mostly people attempting to cross the tracks. In additon there are frequent floods during the monsoon season which affect the rail line, freqently shutting down rail traffic. But people still need to get to work, so this introduces considerable hardship for commuters during the monsoon season.

With respect to green space, there is very little in Bombay and what there is is inaccessible to the general public. Alan estimated that there is 1.5 square meters of green space per capita in Bombay. For comparison, Chicago which has the least amount of parkland per capita among major U.S. cities, has 182 square feet (about 20 square meters) per person. In Bombay there is so little green space, that "park" is used to refer to a car park.

Alan has made an innovative proposal for developing an elevated linear park over the rail line. The Bombay Greenway Project would have some analogies to the Promenade Plantee park in Paris, the High Line Park in New York, and the Cheonggyecheon linear park in Seoul. The park would address many of the challenges Bombay is facing. It would provide substantial green space that would be accessible to all Bombay residents. It would offer a safe and healthy alternative transportation mode for people to get to work, either by walking or cycling, it would provide a safe way to cross the rail lines that would help reduce the annual 4,000 fatalities. During floods it could provide a safe alternative route for people who need to get to work. Alan forsees that it could even be used to harvest water during the monsoon season.

The Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) has conducted a study of the impact of near-real-time monitoring using satellite imagery of illegal deforestation in Brazil's Amazon. In Brazil 80% of the Amazon which originally covered over four million sq km remains with its original vegetation. Amazon deforestation rates accelerated in the early 2000s reaching a peak of over 27,000 sq km in 2004. By 2011 deforestation rates had fallen dramatically to 5,000 sq km. Changes in Brazilian conservation policies, specifically, the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm), has been held responsible for significantly contributed to reducing the rate of deforestation. The objective of the CPI study was to identify Which specific policy efforts contributed most to the reduction in Amazon deforestation. The PPCDAm was the key conservation policy effort of the 2000s. One of the main changes it introduced was the implementation of a satellite-based system that captures and processes georeferenced imagery on forest cover in 15-day intervals called DETER. It was developed by the Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) for the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), which is the national environmental police and law enforcement authority. DETER is capable of detecting deforested areas larger than 25 hectares not covered by clouds.

The image illustrates how deforestation is monitored by DETER. Deforested areas are shown in purple and forest areas in green. For any given location, DETER compares recent images are with older ones to identify changes in forest cover. DETER identifies deforestation hot spots and generates alerts for areas in need of immediate attention by Ibama enforcement personnel. Prior to DETER, deforestation monitoring depended on voluntary and anonymous reports of illegal activity. DETER enabled Ibama to monitor and quickly respond to illegal deforestation activity in near-real-time.

The CPI study took advantage of the fact that cloud cover inhibited monitoring illegal logging in certain areas of the Amazon. The CPI analysis is based on comparing enforcement activities and deforestation rates in areas with greater cloud cover with areas with less cloud cover. It concluded that Ibama is systematically less present in municipalities with greater cloud cover in any given year and consequently these municipalities exhibit higher deforestation the following year.

The CPI analysis found that indicate that the presence of Ibama enforcement personnel (assumed to be proportional to the number of environmental fines applied in a municipality in a given year) significantly reduced deforestation the following year showing that effective monitoring and law enforcement reduces deforestation.

To quantify this effect, CPI performed two simulations. In the first scenario, it was assumed that the annual number of fines in each municipality from 2007 through 2011 was equal to that observed in 2003, the year before the PPCDAm program was launched. This allowed CPI to compare the rates of deforestation in the absence of PPCDAm with what was actually observed which reflects the PPCDAm program. This simulation suggests that without PPCDAm, the Amazon would have lost over 101,000 sq km to illegal deforestation from 2007 through 2011. The actual deforestation observed during this period was 41,500 sq km. This suggest that the PPCDAm policies conserved 59,500 sq km of the Amazon forest.

In the second simulation, CPI assumed a scenario where there was no monitoring and enforcement in other words no fines were applied in all Amazon municipalities from 2007 through 2011. It is concluded that in the absence of any monitoring and law enforcement, over 164,200 sq km of forest would have been deforested between 2007 through 2011 and that monitoring and enforcement saved more than 122,700 sq km of the Amazon.

CPI makes the case that the adoption of a satellite-based system for real-time monitoring of deforestation and effective targeting of law enforcement activities reduced deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The sheer magnitude of the forest area that was preserved indicates that the relative impact of DETER-based monitoring and law enforcement was far greater than that of other conservation policies implemented under the PPCDAm framework.

CPI also concluded that the policy change had no effect on agricultural production supporting the conclusion that both preservation and economic growth can happen simultaneously.

July 11, 2013

At the ESRI User Conference Bill Miller, Director GeoDesign Services at ESRI, previewed a web-based app to support the geodesign workflow. The app is aimed at the planner and is designed to support land use planning, coastal land use planning, disaster response, and similar types of workflows.

What is revolutionary about this app is that it is not a traditional GIS product designed for GIS professionals with years of experience. From what I saw it was intuitive, fast, and easy to use with no or little training. Users can setup their own projects, use Esri or their own data, create plans(scenarios), assess and evaluate them, compare scenarios (ala Urban Observatory),
invite people to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously, and share their work with others, all with no or minimal training. It uses HTML5 and Javascript and so can run in a browser without a plugin on any device.

Some of the things that Bill demonstrated included

create/open a project

invite other people to join

draw points, lines, polygons freehand

use symbol palette (land use types)

set transparency

choose/change basemap

show slope, aspect, and elevation

open scenario/create scenario

copy polygons from one scenario to another

open a dashboard

customize the dashboard

choose layers and weights for a suitability model

run a model, for example, to calculate suitability for open space conservation, or industrial, residential, commercial land use

compare result maps generated from different scenarios side by side

create reports by harvesting dashboards, comparisons, and metrics

collaborate so that two or more users see edits in real-time in their browers on different machines

synchronize map extents so two or more both users see the same work area

Currently it only supports 2D, but it appears to be the intention that 3D would be supported in the future.

At the ESRI User Conference Eric Wittner, a 3D Technology Evangelist, at ESRI presented some Geodesign projects that involve 3D that ESRI has worked on. This was very interesting because it provides a practical perspective on what ESRI considers geodesign to be and secondly how existing software tools can be used for Geodesign.

Geodesign

Based on my experience at the Geodesign Summit last January i've blogged about the different views of what geodesign is, so I won't reiterate that here. Eric's perspective is practical. Geodesign is design that considers geography.

Geodesigning really isn't new. People have been making this type of design decisions since we have been had buildings and towns. Many cities are near water bodies for obvious reasons. Some cities are not near water for other reasons, for example, to avoid mosquitoes and malaria. Eric provided a classic example of bad and good geosdesign in the U.S. by comparing a standard American suburban development with Frank Lloyd Wright's renowned waterfall house.

Architecture and GIS

He mentioned the early geodesign pioneer Ian McHarg who developed geodesign techniques before the term was invented. McHarg’s book Design with Nature, published in 1969, pioneered ecological planning. Geographic overlay maps were not invented by Ian McHarg, founder of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Universityof Pennsylvania, but were popularized by him within the architectural profession. Some of the tools used by McHarg that would be familiar to GIS people include overlay maps, transects, diagrams, drawings, bird’s eye perspective, photography and block diagrams. But McHarg did all this with paper, mylar and acetates because he didn't have the computerized GIS tools we have today.

Modern geodesign is a systematic approach to design that uses computer GIS tools to incorporate geography into the process of designing(planning) buildings and infrastructure. Initially geodesign used 2D tools exclusively. But now as 3D is being integrated into GIS tools, geodesign is also beginning to leverage 3D and some of the examples that Wittner showed used 3D.

Geodesign as a process

From the examples I have seen, the focus of geodesign, at least in how it is used at the present, is on the planning phase, rather than the design phase of the construction lifecycle. But like BIM processes, geodesign is collaborative, but it is perhaps more multi-disciplinary (involving a wider range of stakeholders including politicians and the public), multi-scale (involving different levels of government) and iterative (typical in planning) than is typical of most BIM design processes.

As a simple infrastucture example, if you have ever been to Redlands you'll know that it is not a pedestrian-friendly place. Roads are wide, cars go fast, often there are not sidewalks, or sidewallks disappear into rail lines. On a hot day, you're likely exposed to direct sun. Wittner gave a very simple example of how geodesign could be used to encourage people to walk or bicycle in Redlands by narrowing roads, adding sidewalks, and planting trees to provide shade. But the key to success in making simething like this happen is that you have to get all the stakeholders participating in the planning process.

City of Honolulu

Another example is the City
of Honolulu where the challenge was to accomodate 140,000 new residents
without significatly increasing Honolulu's infamous traffic problem and
suburban sprawl. They knew they had to grow up rather than out.

What
was being proposed was a light rail system. They looked at each
station, did a 2D walkability analysis to identify areas where Americans
would be willing to walk. They found that they could acoomodate 80% of
the 140,000 new residents in areas that were within walking distamce of
light rail stations.

They then created a 3D basemap,
by using a rule-based procedure to create fairly realistic (textured)
models of existing buildings. Then based on zoning, they created 3D
models of potential buildings to show what the maximum development would
look like based on zoning restrictions. But the City wanted realistic
representations of buildings, so the project team automatically textured the
buildings based on building type. They found that with a rule-based
approach it was fairly easy to accomodate changes made by the
contractors and the City.

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The City then wanted to show what the alternative development would look like if they didn't densify, and allowed more sprawl and worse traffic. From this analysis they found that by densifying they preserve 105 000 acres from development.

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In
this example, 3D was used primaily to be able to visualize for city
leaders and the public what the proposed development would look like. This is fairly typical of the use of 3D for this type of project.

Philadelphia Logan Square

Wittner described a very interesting geodesign project In Philadelphia where the objective was to rezone a part of Philadelphia to encourage economic development. For this project 3D was esentail to the analysis.

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Again, this involved an interative process. They first assessed the existing buildings and spaces, created 3D models of the existing buildings, and then did a multi-criterion suitability map to assess development potential. Their first attempt showed very little potential for development, primarily because of limited accessability.

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They then extended a light rail system into the area and found that it enabled much more development potential. They then created 3D models of potential new buildings and looked at times to walk to the light rail stations from different floors, opportunities for residential, commercial, and retail development at different locations and on different floors with different zoning policies, for example, zoning for higher buildings.

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For residential potential they used criteria like proximity to retail and light rail, parking, and quality of view. For quality of view, they identified historic buildings, waterfront, and other features that would contribute to what people would like to see. Because they could calculate the square footage available on different floors and at different locations, they had a metric for assessing the development potential for residential, commercial, and retail under different zoning policies. For example, higher buildings tend to favor more residential because the quality of view is better on higher floors.

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This is an example where 3D is essential part of the analytics of the project.

January 24, 2013

Last night Carl Steinitz, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, gave two presentations. The first addressed the queston of how to organize education in geosdesign and was the result of Carl being invited to advise a specific university (which remained nameless).
Last night's talk was the actual presentation he gave at the university at the culmination of a week's visit to the university. The second was a personal history of the early days in the development of geodesign, primarily in the 60s.

Organizing education in geodesign

Geodesign involves bringing together the design professions (architecture and engineering), technology, the geographic sciences, and wha Carl calls the people of the place, the folks that are going to live in the result of a "geodesigned" environment. A major challenge arises from scale. Scientists approaach things from the universal anf global, designers from the local, even at the level of one building or one parcel.

Carl made the case that the most important thing that all students of geodesign, regardless of their background, need to learn is how to collaborate in a multi-disciplinary project environment involving architects, engineers, IT folks, and folks from geographically-oriented sciences. He made specific recommendations on how to do this, not generally applicable to all unversities but tailored to the specific unnamed univesity he had been asked to advise.

Carl Steinitz was part of these early developments. Last night he gave a personal perspective on the early days of geodesign.

From a technical perspective the developments I found most fascinating were the first computer geographic computer graphics that was created by hooking an IBM Selectric typewriter to a computer and using overprinting to create an approximation of grey scale thematic maps. The program to do this, SYMAP, was developed by Howard Fisher in 1963. When the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics was founded in 1966, Howard Fisher was its first director. Carl also described some of the ways colour printing was simulated in these early days, and early 3D imagery.

An interesting recollection in this fascinating talk was that computing was introduced into the design course via tutorials as and when needed, not as a separate course.

Carl described the development of geodesign methodogies such as moving from traditional programming languages in the direction of what became map algebra, spatial analysis, automating aspects of design and using linear programming to optimize design. As Carl said they did it all, though some of it was too expensive at that time to be of practical use.

September 12, 2012

Last week a memorial event was held in Ottawa for Wolfgang Bitterlich, one of the early technical innovators in spatial analyics. Organized by his friend Mike Comeau, the memorial brought together a large group of Wolfgang's friends and colleagues including many that I have known from the early days of DPA and Tydac; Laura Bobak, the daughter of Wolfgang's long time partner Esther Bobak and whom together with her sister Nadya Wolf regarded as his own daughters, Giulio Maffini and Maryjane Maffini, Richard Higgins, Louis Burry and his wife Sandra, Anne-Marie Hogue,Terry and Iris Moloney, Adla Worobec and Graham Stickler, Wendy and Dave Branson, Peter and Erin Kuciak, Kate Dickinson, Bruce Thomas, Rob and Beth VanWyngaarden, Bob Madill, and Chris McBean, Fred and Joanne Meth, and Klaus and Judy. Quite a few years ago Wolf moved to Los Angeles, so this was the first opportunity for many of us in Ottawa to meet Wolf's wife Nidia, and her family, Elizabeth, Danny and Priscilla from Los Angeles.

Rick Higgins who was master of ceremonies, provided an opportunity for other people also to speak about their recollections of Wolf - Fred Meth, who had known Wolf since 1971; Giulio Maffini, the other half of the dynamic concept/technical team that conceived and implemented Tydac's SPANS (Spatial Analysis System); Laura Bobak, who gave a touching perspective on what Wolf meant to her as a surrogate father beginning at age eight; Maryjane Maffini who read a letter from Michael Simmons who had been with Wolf at Tydac; myself; Danny, Nidia's son; Rick Higgins who told a very funny story about Wolf as the Russian ambassador in Sri Lanka; Adla Worobec; Louis Burry, Wolf's right hand man who worked with Wolf on the technical side for many years in the 80's and early 90's; Doron Nussbaum who also worked with Wolf at Tydac; Judy and Klaus, who played chess with Wolf in Vancouver; and finally Maryjane read a letter from Fiona Smith in Australia.

SPANS

To put Wolf''s contribution in context, Canada has been an early leader in geospatial technology. In the mid 1960’s, the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS), written in IBM 360 assembler and running on OS360 was developed under the aegis of the Department of Forestry and Rural Development. By the late 1960's and 70s, and through the 1980's the Canada Land Inventory (CLI) was managing a geospatial database containing 2.5 million square kilometers of land and water. (The CLI database is still available on GeoGratis).

Richard Higgins founded DPA Consulting in October, 1973 in Halifax. Giulio Maffini joined DPA in 1975 and together they managed to attract Wolfgang from the Technical University of Nova Scotia to join DPA, aslo in 1975. As a result of the combination of Giulio's conceptual and Wolf's technical genius, many DPA projects were based on innovative modeling and simulation technologies. In the early 1980's a few of these projects involved land use planning, for example, for Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and Sri Lanka. Land use programming requires geospatial analysis, and Wolf implemented an early, but innovative, spatial analytics application based on a grid to support these projects. In those days the only alternatives for printing graphics were very high end printers like Applicon and Calcomp, pen plotters, and dot matrix printers such as Printronix that allowed you address individual pixels. I joined DPA in 1981 and to my recollection all of the graphics included in the Dartmouth and Sri Lanka reports were produced on a Printronix printer. At this time, to give some context for the state of geospatial technology, IBM's GFIS system was storing spatial data in a hierarchical database on OS360 and ArcInfo, written in Fortran, was running on mini-computers.

The early 1980's were an inflection point in computing. I had bought and assembled my first microcomputer, a Heathkit H89 with a Z80 CPU, in the late seventies and I had just successfully completed a DPA survey project using my H89 at considerably less than using an IBM360 timeshare would have cost. It was obvious to me and to Richard and Giulio that the microcomputer dramatically reduced the cost of entry compared to mainframes and mini-computers making it possible for even small companies to develop and market products for the new platform.

In 1984/1985 Richard and Giulio, projecting that the spatial analytics market had a large potential and seeing the rapid expansion of the microcomputer user community after the incredibly successful introduction in 1981 of the IBM PC, founded Tydac Technologies to develop and market a spatial software product that became known as SPANS.

The initial Tydac team was the combination of Richard's business acumen and Giulio's conceptual and Wolfgang's mathematical genius. Later Louis Burry brought his programming and system architecture expertise to Tydac to complement Wolf's mathematical genius.

The most innovative element of the SPANS system was the use of quadtrees, a mathematical approach used by Wolf to provide an efficient grid-based foundation for spatial analytics.

Another major innovation was potential mapping, known as POT MAP to SPANS users, and as multi-factor suitability analysis to the broader geospatial community, that allows you to model and display spatially land use suitability for agricultural, foresty, industrial, and commercial projects. The SPANS modeling language allowed users to perform very sophisticated suitability analyses involving many variables. SPANS users believe that even today no GIS has reached the level of spatial analytics that was possible with the SPANS modeling language. SPANS originally was developed and ran on DOS with high end graphics cards from companies such as Number Nine. Later it was migrated to OS/2. The first SPANS product on Windows was SPANS MAP.

I joined Tydac in 1987 and by the early 1990's Tydac was one was one of the top 10 GIS companies in the world with more than 3000 systems installed in over 60 countries. In the December 1992 issue of InfoWorld, there was a very interesting review of several of the geospatial products that were available at that time including Atlas GIS 2.0, MapInfo for Windows 2.0, and SPANS GIS 5.0. The review was very perceptive,

"Tydac Technologies Corp's Spatial Analysis System (SPANS) GIS is the most powerful program in this comparison. In addition to its capability to incorporate both raster and vector images into maps, this OS/2 program offers an extremely strong, if difficult-to-learn, set of analytic tools. ... Surprisingly, SPANS GIS lacks some of the basic features one would expect in such as high-end program, such as address geocoding and a traditional database interface. And the program almost completely lacks formatting features required to print high-quality map presentations. For these tasks, SPANS GIS relies upon a lower end sibling, SPANS MAP, which is capable of loading and altering maps from SPANS GIS."

As I was the project lead for SPANS MAP, I knew exactly what the technical issues were, but what is perhaps only clear in hindsight is that SPANS was an innovative spatial analytics engine, way ahead of its time, capable of the most sophisticated spatial analysis. To categorize it as a general purpose GIS was misrepresenting it and its capabilities.

To continue the saga of Tydac, in 1991 Flavio Hendry founded Tydac AG in Bern, Switzerland, so the Tydac name continues to this day. In fact a few years ago, Flavio asked me to come to the Tydac AG User Group meeting in Küsnacht to speak on the topic "20 Years of GIS: From SPANS to Google". The SPANS code base was acquired by PCI, the company to which Louis Burry moved, and is incorporated in PCI's Geomatica.

Alll of us who were involved with SPANS recognize that Wolf's innovative technical genius provided the foundation for an, even to this day, amazingly innovative geospatial analytical engine that moved goepatial analytics far ahead of the simple mapping applications that were typical of GIS products in the 1980's. But many of us remember Wolf not just as colleague but as a friend. Laura's recollections of Wolf were so poignant at the memorial event. Giulio's and others' recollections expressed such a sadness about Wolf's leaving us because he was a friend. My wife Ellen and I often went swimming with Wolf at Blanchard Beach on Meech Lake, his favourite swimming location. We also remember having a great time touring the lock sites on the Rideau Canal with Wolf and Esther. But what remains in my memory, and it was expressed so well in Laura's recollections, was Wolf's incredible loyalty to those near and dear to him. He was a great innovator and for many of us a good friend.

April 24, 2012

At the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam, Peter Creuzer, Director State Survey of Lower Saxony, gave a very interesting introduction to land management in Germany and some of the things that are on the horizon.

Germany has about 82 million citizens, or about 229 people per km2, and the population has been declining since 2003. It has about 64.5 million parcels (land properties) valued at about €9 trillion. About 48% of households own land. The land administration system handles about a million transactions per year.

Germany has the same problem that other jurisdictions have, urbanization, but it has limited land resources. It loses about 77 hectares/day to urban sprawl.

Land administration in Germany is comprised of two parts, a land register and the cadastre.The land register includes information about owners, land use, encumbrances, and other legal obligations. The cadastre includes the land parcel geometry, owneship, buildings and public restrictions. The objectives of the land administration system are security of tenure, some revenue for the government, and support for a transparent planning process.

There are some interesting future goals, one of the most important of which is enabling sustainable development. This includes land consolidation and revitalization of older cities.

Another major initiative is revision of the land taxation system which is expected to be completed by 2014. The alternatives that are being considered are taxation based on market value (which is what is used in Ontario), a fixed tax, and a combined system.

There is also a new data model underway based on ISO and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards referred to by the abbreviation AAA, which stands for AFIS (uniform geodetic reference), ALKIS (uniform cadastre), and ATKIS (uniform topography). By 2013 the data model will include support for a 3D cadastre and will include the CityGML standard. It will be accessible via OGC web services; WMS, WFS, and others.

Germany is also working on being compliant with the EU INSPIRE directive. There is a pilot in progess involving the Netherlands, Lower Saxony, and North Rhine Westphalia.

Among other objectives the Blueprint will address water efficiency. The Blueprint will provide "first indications" for water efficiency targets including the development of water efficiency targets at the sectoral and river basin level. In addition, it will ain at improving water efficiency in buildings and in distribution networks. The time horizon of the Blueprint is 2020, but the analysis supporting the Blueprint will cover up to 2050.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) has just published the first in a series of five reports that EEA will publish in 2012 to support the development of the Blueprint. This first report focusses on resource efficiency.

Some of the major global issues that will impact the EU are growing global demand for food and increasing cultivation of biofuel crops, recognition of the interdependence of water, energy and land use, and the impact of climate change. As a result of climate change much of Europe will likely face reduced water availability during summer months and the frequency and intensity of drought is projected to increase in the south.

The report argues that to enable sustainable economic production future economic growth must be decoupled from environmental impacts and that this requires increased resource-efficiency innovations and limits to environmental impact. The Water Framework Directive was intended to define the limits to water environemntal impact by defining and mandating 'good status' objective for EU water bodies.

Resource-efficient technologies in agricultural irrigation, water supply and treatment can deliver substantial water savings. Sustainable public and industrial water management depends on innovative production treatments and processes, ecological design in buildings and better urban planning.

The report recognizes the interdependence of water use, energy production, and land use. For example, technologies that cut water use also help to reduce energy use. The energy intensity of deslainationrequires the development of renewable energy. Hydropower while reducung emissions has impacts on water ecosystems, which limits the growth potential of hydropower compared to wind and solar energy.

Some of the economic measures that the report anticipates can inprove water efficiency includes water pricing and market-based policies. Water prices and tariffs should reflect the true costs of water including environmental and resource costs. In the case of public water supply, volumetric pricing and metering needs to generate adequate revenues to finance resource-efficiency measures and upgrade aging infrastructure. Utilities expenditures and investments needs to be transparent to consumers. For water used in irrigation, pricing structures should provide more incentives for resource efficiency removal of adverse agricultural subsidies should be a priority.

The report also promates an integrated apprioach to sustainable water management, Water efficiency must be consideres together with resource efficiency s energy and land use. The WFD provides the limits to environmental sustainability that should be applied in an integrated approach to define common limits for sustainability for the competing users in all sectors including agriculture, energy, transport and tourism. This will require strong intersectoral exchange, particularly in operational water management at the river basin level.